The communication of confidential and non-confidential information is used in many aspects of commerce, health and medical data, and data for personal, commercial, industrial, and national entities, and all levels there between. An increasing percentage of purchases are made online, or over the telephone, with payment effectuated by use of a credit or debit card number provided by the user, usually by a digital phone.
SSNs are also often requested by medical organizations and given over the phone along with other types of sensitive numeric data (CVV, expiry date, D.O.B., etc.). All of this sensitive information is typically stored along with all other personal details creating a huge exposure for identity theft or fraud. This sensitive information is frequently requested to be spoken over a call whereupon an operator/agent would note down the information of type it in to forms or fields. This method of transmitting sensitive information is highly prone to fraud, error, abuse and data loss or data theft. The agents themselves have access to all the sensitive information, the systems they are using could already be compromised and the data systems themselves are usually accessible to a large number of individuals.
The tone generated by a hard or soft pushbutton telephone is called a dual-tone multi-frequency (DTMF) signal. The two tones distinguish this signal from a normal human voice, which is a single tone.
The method described helps to address all of these shortcomings by never revealing the sensitive data to the agents and by allowing the automatic replacement of this data with harmless substitutes within the data systems themselves.
Other features of the present embodiments will be apparent from the accompanying drawings and from the detailed description that follows.